Sunday, August 30, 2009

Dear Author

Five pages of detailed clauses that spell the agreement between the author and the publisher.

I read each one of them, made notes, and chewed on my thoughts.

One clause is about competing work. It says that I, the author, can’t print or publish during the term of the agreement any portion of my novel, FLESH, or any work that might compete with or reduce the sales of FLESH. Interesting, I thought. What about giving excerpts from my novel in my blog? I intend to blog about my writing, and also about FLESH, but not giving away too much of my forthcoming novel. Better ask your publisher, I thought. Better safe than sorry. To my relief, he said that prior to publication, I could publish or blog about parts of FLESH, even in a short-story length. But he advised me not to publish large parts of it without his consent.

I read the manuscript delivery date: January 1, 2011. Ready for publication? No, he told me. Ready for pre-press process. There will be galley proof for me to read, edit, correct, before everything is locked down. Yet he assured me that the editing will be completed well before that date. Amen! I went back to one of my publisher’s earlier emails. He told me there would be minor editing only, no substantive changes. Thank God! Then I thanked myself for having done my work in getting the manuscript ready. Again, ‘ready’ is a relative word. Each writer who wants to become an author goes about his editorial labor differently. The author would thank himself when his manuscript is acquired by a publisher. However, many will be asked to revise their manuscripts structurally, and that’s when it’s no longer fun. The truth is: There could be a significant lapse between the time the writer’s final manuscript is acquired and the time his publisher requests a revision. By then the writer might have lost touch with his novel’s characters. To transport himself back to any scene to be rewritten in his novel, he needs the mood – not his mood. The scene’s mood keeps it alive, like water to plants. Worse of all revisions is structural revision. Here the writer might have to change the narrative’s voice, from first-person point of view to third-person point of view, or vice versa. He might have to add a new character to support the revised cast. Or he might have to enliven an existing character to make it three dimensional. Not only that, the dialogue in his novel might be subjected to revision as well, because no character speaks like another, no matter how you put words in their mouths.

When the publisher buys your novel, reads it, and declares that only minor editing is needed – you exhale! You feel blessed. Why? Perhaps by now you have already started writing your next novel. And the worst thing that will definitely affect your writing – and your writing schedule – is a structural revision. It’s a bad dream like Alfred Hitchcock said, “Give them pleasure the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”

Then I consulted my good friend, Stephen Evans, a novelist, on the clauses of my contract. Steve’s first novel, The Marriage of True Minds, came out in 2008. To date, I thought it was one of the finest novels published that year. After I took in his advice, I signed the contract and mailed it back to my publisher.

Writers. Authors. What a long and winding road.

Afterward I sat and read Charles Bukowski. Funny. When my mood needs a booster, I read Bukowski. Someone asked him this: “Who do you consider the greatest writer of all time?” He said, “I do not consider the greatest writer of all time. I consider a few moderns, then forget them. This is not conceit but a defense against intrusion.” Then another question: “Why do you write?” He said, “I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It’s as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.” And a final question (for this post): “Does pain make a writer?” He said, “Pain doesn’t make anything, nor does poverty. The artist is there first. . . . If his luck is good, he becomes a bad artist. If his luck is bad, he becomes a good one.”

Thank you all, June, BPOTW, and Kim. And yes, Kim, we can only do what we love best. Our creation is the result of our labor, pain and creativity. With writing in particular, the pain from the prolonged labor of writing seems magnified tenfold when we face rejection after rejection; yet we keep writing. I felt amused when my friend Aki quoted Ray Bradbury in her Facebook: "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you...."

The Magnificent Seven

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About Me

Khanh Ha studied Journalism at Ohio University and learned the craft of writing under Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon) and Walter Tevis (The Man Who Fell to Earth). He is the author of Flesh (2012, Black Heron Press) and The Demon Who Peddled Longing (2014, Underground Voices). He is a five-time Pushcart nominee, a Best Indie Lit New England nominee, a finalist of THE WILLIAM FAULKNER-WISDOM CREATIVE WRITING AWARD, and the recipient of Greensboro Review’s 2014 ROBERT WATSON LITERARY PRIZE IN FICTION. His work, The Demon Who Peddled Longing, was honored by Shelf Unbound as a NOTABLE INDIE BOOK.

The Uncreate

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time or all of the time they could afford it; mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, you would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

—ErnestHemingway(A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel)

19 inches of a green screen tv

The tv was on. Kids stared straight into the tube, heads held by miniature hands.

It was a black & white set, with a piece of green plastic glued to the tube. The old man liked it like that. It stayed like that. Period.

Kennedy was killed on that tv.

Vietnam was started on it.

It was a damned television.

—Bill Shields

Goodreads

My Bookshelf:

PHRASES

When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our eyes' astonishment, —a beach for two faithful children,— a musical house for our pure sympathy, —I shall find you.

Should there be here below but a single old man, handsome and calm in the midst of incredible luxury, I shall be at your feet.

Should I have realized all your memories, —should I be the one who can bind you hand and foot, —I shall strangle you.

— Arthur Rimbaud

The Ascendance of a Blogger

If you happen to look at this bottom of mine, do you know how long it has taken to rise to the top?